Stage: Main Stage

Explore the frontier of accessible gaming as industry leaders discuss groundbreaking advances in screen readers, audio descriptions, and inclusive design practices. This panel brings together expert accessibility consultants and specialists who have shaped major titles like The Last of Us, God of War, and Spider-Man to share insights on making games truly accessible for players with vision loss. Learn how developers can implement practical solutions and collaborate with the blind gaming community to create immersive experiences that everyone can enjoy.

Discover the evolving landscape of accessibility tech investment through the eyes of successful founders and impact-focused investors. This dynamic session explores how the “ADA generation” is driving unprecedented growth in inclusive innovation, with 1 in 6 adults globally representing a vast market for accessible solutions. Learn about diverse funding pathways through accelerators, grants, and venture capital, with direct access to valuable resources including Remarkable Accelerator, Access to Success, Moonshot, and more. Our expert panel will share practical insights on early-stage funding strategies and discuss how inclusive design thinking is key to creating sustainable, impactful products that benefit everyone.

Join us for a thought-provoking exploration of AI’s revolutionary impact on digital accessibility. As traditional interfaces evolve and new technologies emerge, this session examines how AI could bridge existing accessibility gaps while potentially creating new challenges. Our distinguished speakers will discuss breakthrough innovations like multimodal AI, immersive experiences, and Microsoft’s Seeing AI, a free app that narrates the visual world for the blind and low-vision community. Discover how emerging AI solutions, from virtual assistants to robotic devices, could transform digital equity on a global scale, and learn why proactive collaboration is essential to ensure technology’s evolution remains accessible to all.

At Sight Tech Global we rarely track products from year to year, but APH’s Monarch tactile display for the education market is an important exception. APH’s collaboration with Humanware and DOT is targeted at the education market to deliver not just a ground-breaking dynamic Braille tablet that can “receive digital textbooks from APH and other providers, significantly reducing the time to fingertips for our students” and at the same time render the charts and graphs crucial to STEM education. Add to that the possibilities of the past year’s breakthroughs in generative AI, and Monarch’s horizon looks even more exciting. 

Greg Stilson will be available for live questions in a breakout session listed in the agenda.

Who loves the idea of autonomous, driverless taxis best? Hard to say, but anyone who is blind will likely tell you they can’t wait. Why? The human drivers in ride-share apps turn down passengers with guide dogs, and driving with a stranger is that much more stressful when you can’t see them. And fundamentally, it’s about mobility without reliance on other people. That’s why Lighthouse and NFB took a big interest in Waymo’s San Francisco rollout and even took up the cause for the autonomous taxis.

Envision is a pioneer in the effort to connect computer vision with everyday life in the form of tech-enabled glasses that can tell a blind user about their surroundings. Using the Google glass platform, Envision found a market with blind users who value a hands-free interaction, and the experience only got better with the launch of scene description AIs in the past two years. But what’s really changed the game for Envision is generative AI, and the tantalizing possibility of a multimodal AI that’s more like an all-around personal assistant.

Immediately following this session, Karthik Mahadevan will be available to take questions live in a breakout session.

To watch the recently released “All The Light We Cannot See” with audio descriptions “on” is a revelation, at least for a sighted person. The audio description uses words sparingly to augment the obvious soundscape and to call out subtle details anyone might easily miss. It’s art only a human team could produce (sorry AI proponents), but then it’s also expensive and time consuming. In that regard, producing alt text for images online or audio descriptions for video face the same challenge: how to do more and do it well. At Scribely and MAX, the human-first approach is uppermost, but they are also exploring how AI and related tech can be narrowly channeled to speed up their vital work.

Nearly four years ago, Salesforce stepped ahead in the tech and corporate world by announcing the formation of an Office of Accessibility, charged with pulling together all the strands of accessibility across the CRM giant, including workforce development, product development and design, and customer relations. Sight Tech Global touched base with the fledgling effort in 2020 and in this session we’ll hear what the accessibility team has learned after three years work to ensure every aspect of Salesforce embraces accessibility.